Title Case Converter
Capitalise a headline the way your style guide actually requires. Pick AP, APA, Chicago or MLA and the result updates as you type.
Style guide
Why the same title comes out differently
Every style guide agrees on the easy part: capitalise the important words, capitalise the first and last word, and capitalise the first word after a colon. They disagree about the small words in between, and that disagreement is the whole reason this page has four buttons.
| Style | What stays lowercase | Example |
|---|---|---|
| AP | Articles, and conjunctions and prepositions of three letters or fewer. Anything four letters or longer is capitalised. | A Note About the Weather From Below |
| APA | The same four-letter rule as AP, but both halves of a hyphenated compound are capitalised. | A Note About the Weather From Below |
| Chicago | Articles, coordinating conjunctions, and all prepositions no matter how long. | A Note about the Weather from Below |
| MLA | Same as Chicago: prepositions stay lowercase at any length, as does "to" in an infinitive. | A Note about the Weather from Below |
The practical difference is the long prepositions. AP and APA capitalise "About", "Between", "Through" and "Without" because they are four letters or more. Chicago and MLA keep them lowercase because they are prepositions, full stop. If you are writing for a news outlet or a marketing team, AP is almost certainly the house style. If you are writing an academic paper or a book, it is Chicago or MLA.
AP and APA agree often enough that most titles come out identical. Where they part company is hyphenation: APA capitalises both halves of a compound like "Self-Reported", while AP and Chicago leave a small second element lowercase.
The rules all four share
- The first word is always capitalised, whatever it is. "The" and "A" at the start of a title get a capital.
- The last word is always capitalised, even if it is a preposition. "What Are You Waiting For" ends with a capital F.
- The first word after a colon is capitalised, because a subtitle starts a new unit. This is the rule the naive converters get wrong most often.
- Acronyms keep their capitals. NASA does not become Nasa.
Where a converter cannot help
Two things still need a human. Proper nouns that are lowercase in ordinary use — brand names like iPhone, surnames like van Gogh — depend on knowing what the word refers to. And Chicago allows a stressed preposition to be capitalised for emphasis, as in "What It Is All About", which is a judgement about meaning rather than a rule a tool can apply. Read the result before you publish it.
- Which style should I use if nobody has told me?
- AP for anything journalistic, commercial or web-facing. Chicago for books and long-form non-fiction. APA for psychology and the social sciences, MLA for humanities. If you are writing for yourself, pick one and stay consistent — consistency matters more than which you chose.
- Why is "is" capitalised when it is only two letters?
- Because length is not the only test. "Is" is a verb, and every style guide capitalises verbs in a title regardless of how short they are. The length rule only applies to articles, conjunctions and prepositions.
- Does it work on several titles at once?
- Yes. Put one title per line and each line is treated as its own title, with its own first and last word.
- Is my text sent anywhere?
- No. Everything runs in your browser. Nothing is uploaded or stored.
Questions
Need something other than a title? The main case converter handles UPPERCASE, lowercase, camelCase, snake_case and text clean-up, and there is a dedicated sentence case converter for body text.